Outdoor mobile object tracking such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) is known. In the GPS system of the U.S.A. or similar systems such as the GLONASS system of Russia, the Doppler Orbitography and Radio-positioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) of France, the Galileo system of the European Union and the BeiDou system of China, a plurality of satellites on earth orbits communicate with a mobile device in an outdoor environment to determine the location thereof. However, a drawback of these systems is that the satellite communication generally requires line-of-sight communication between the satellites and the mobile device, and thus they are generally unusable in indoor environments, except in restricted areas adjacent to windows and open doors.
Some indoor mobile object tracking methods and systems are also known. For example, in the Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) technology, such as the iBeacon™ technology specified by Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., U.S.A. or Samsung's Proximity™, a plurality of BLE access points are deployed in a site and communicate with nearby mobile BLE devices such as smartphones for locating the mobile BLE devices using triangulation. Also indoor WiFi signals are becoming ubiquitous and commonly used for object tracking based on radio signal strength (RSS) observables. However, the mobile object tracking accuracy of these systems is still to be improved. Moreover, these systems can only track the location of a mobile object, and other information such as gestures of a person being tracked cannot be determined by these systems.
It is therefore an object to provide a novel mobile object tracking system and method with higher accuracy, robustness and that provides more information about the mobile objects being tracked.